The Importance of Page Loading Speed and Simple Ways to Improve It

When starting up their business online, many site owners fail to realise the importance of the page loading speed and how it affects the traffic.

The longer you are unable to attract visitors, the higher the chances that your website will get lost in the vastness of the internet for good.

Google uses many factors to determine the ranking of a website in its search results. Such metrics include the content of the site, the quality and the number of links toward it, the domain name, etc. Back in 2010, Google announced that Page Load Speed would also start to impact the overall ranking of Search Engine results.

Many and more web developers are now turning towards using AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) with PWA (Progressive Web App), to improve their rankings page load speeds on their way to Google’s first page.

One of the many successful companies, ‘Mynet’, took their website loading time very seriously and switched to AMP/PWA. After launching their PWA (Progressive Web App) that uses AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages), they saw around 4x decrease in page load time.

This drastic improvement led to some impressive numbers:

25% more revenue per article page

24% decrease in bounce rates

34% increase in their average page views

There are multiple ways to increase page loading speed that every web developer should consider:

Front-End Code Improvements

A web developer can keep track of multiple flaws in the architecture of the website layers to improve page load times.

Minimise HTTP Requests

As per the tech giant ‘Yahoo’, more than 80% of a web page load time consists of HTTP requests, to download various resources like Images, CSS, Scripts etc.

To exclude such issues:

Use CSS instead of images, wherever possible.

Combine multiple stylesheets into a single file.

Always load the scripts at the bottom of the page and keep a close eye to reduce the number of scripts on a page.

Enable Compressions and Minification of Resources

Larger web pages are several megabytes in size, which makes them slow to load and process. To avoid such slowness, always compress your package files and minify the HTML/CSS files of that web page.

There are multiple tools available online to compress and minify the resources:

YUI Compressor to minify CSS and JS

GZIP to compress web page files before sending them toward the end users’ browsers

One of the most reliable builders is SiteBuilder. It is slightly ahead of its competitors in terms of page load speeds, uptime, and usability.

Optimise Images

The most integral aspect of a web page speed is the way it serves images. Websites often rely on high-quality images to attract potential users, but this strategy can backfire spectacularly when not applied properly.

There are multiple ways to optimise the images on a web page:

Use image-size reduction tool – bigger image size can be the most painful hindrance in loading a page fast. There are multiple online tools to reduce the actual image to a few Kbs, to make it web-perfect and light.

Use progressive image – recent web technology developments led to the progressive image rendering, which allows pages to load much faster, uncluttered by several pictures loading simultaneously; first, a low-quality image is displayed and then it is progressively rendered as the site loads, as opposed to conventional baseline JPEG loading. This step reduces the page load time by over 60%.

Tip: Among the many website builders, the most powerful builder available for proper image optimization and a progressive JPEG image display is Wix.

Use CDN

Content Delivery Network (CDN) is a network of servers located all over the world. They serve web pages and required content according to the geographic location of the customer, making websites accessible at the same speed anywhere.

This technology eliminates the page speed problems for users, who are a couple of continents away from the website’s original data centre.

CDN basically make static copies of your web page available on a server located near you, hence decreasing the load time for the website.

Tip: You may use some of most trusted CDN tools like CloudFlare or Cloud Delivery Platform – Akamai.

Conclusion:

As the online business era is expanding day by day, there will be a constant increase in the urge to keep the web pages flashier, full of rich content and utilising the latest CSS tricks.

That’s why it is more important than ever to adopt the most efficient page building techniques to keep the page load times to a minimum and attract more online visitors.